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posted by martyb on Friday October 19 2018, @07:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the 🎶-the-answer-is-blowin'-in-the-wind-🎶 dept.

ScienceNews:

Twisters are twirling away from Tornado Alley.

From 1979 to 2017, annual tornado frequency slightly decreased over the region, which stretches across the central and southern Great Plains of the United States, a study finds. Conversely, a higher number of storms touched down in areas east of the Mississippi River over the same period, researchers report October 17 in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.

"The great Tornado Alley is still No. 1 in terms of [overall] frequency," says coauthor Victor Gensini, an applied climatologist at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. But more tornadoes in communities ill-prepared to face the relatively unfamiliar storms, such as in the southeastern United States, could mean more infrastructure damage and loss of life.

The Deep South should get to work on its tornado shelters?


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday October 19 2018, @04:45PM (5 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 19 2018, @04:45PM (#751007) Journal

    Maybe.

    FWIW, I believe in climate change already, but I'm not convinced that this is related. It *could* be, but I'd need some grounds for the attribution, e.g. "tornadoes are normally driven west by the more active jet stream", but that explanation looks really fallacious for this event.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @06:24PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @06:24PM (#751065)

    Climate change theorists predicted that tornadoes would increase east of the Mississippi river but decrease west of it.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 19 2018, @08:02PM (3 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 19 2018, @08:02PM (#751122) Journal

      Climate change theorists predicted that tornadoes would increase east of the Mississippi river but decrease west of it.

      Did they, eh? So this is a prediction then?

      Recent increases in computational efficiency have led several studies to explicitly depict severe convective storms in convective permitting regional climate model configurations to evade the previously discussed environmental caveats.20,21,22,23,24,25 These dynamical downscaling approaches (sometimes referred to as model telescoping) have proven reliable for the replication of spatial frequency and temporal timing of the annual peak of boreal severe weather activity. Potential changes in characteristics of late 21st century severe weather activity have also been posited by these methods. However, due to the resource intensive nature of these approaches, long model-derived climatologies are often unfeasible and it is not yet clear if the explanatory capability is significantly better than environments to justify the resources necessary to conduct such simulations.

      A glaring warning sign of anti-scientific bias is false confidence.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @09:07PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @09:07PM (#751153)

        Climate scientists use ensembles of models that predict every possible outcome of climate change. Each model makes assumptions that contradict the other models. Then once something happens they go back and cherry pick the ones that "predicted" the right thing. Its like string theory or dark matter theory, once we start heading towards the next mini-ice age they will say they predicted that too.